I queried this at the time and Mark Richardson (who obv likes a lot of electronic music) explained that he'd loved that album and converted several other writers.

I think the exact same thing happened the next year with Fennesz's "Endless Summer" at #2!

I agree with Tim for the most part, but statistical randomness in poll results is somewhat dependent on the point tallying system for the poll (yeah, I harp on this every year) ... so for example, one person might convert a bunch of colleagues to something completely new (to them), but chances are they'll toss that album in at #8 or #9 on their list, not #1 or #2, so if pollmakers choose an unweighted (50, 49, 48, ... 3, 2, 1) point scheme or even a mildly weighted scheme, then they're opening themselves up to having a poll that's inexplicably dominated by a bunch of #9 throw-in votes.

Surely Lil Wayne will be the main beneficiary of the 9th/10th votes this year. People who like hip hop but don't listen to it all the time tend to feel odd about not including at least one example in their top 10, even in a weak year, but what they intend to say - "I like hip hop even though I haven't heard much good stuff this year" - reads more as "I don't really like hip hop but feel obliged to include one album in order to seem eclectic", ie a sincere motive (at least in some cases) reads as a bogus one. Hence an album which even most Lil Wayne fans admit is patchy ends up, once the votes are tallied, looking like a masterpiece for want of any serious competition. Like Tim says, the same thing happened with OutKast in 2003, although I unfashionably still think that was genuinely deserving.

Anyway, the lists so far prove that my theory about Portishead placing highly in P&J obviously derives from hanging out with an unrepresentative number of Portishead fans.

wish these mags would show some balls for once and just do a Top 50 Albums We Feel Deserve More Love ignoring anything that went top 40 or sold over a certain amount. what is the point of a list like Q's? they could do something a lot more interesting and useful to their readers but no.

So that people who buy five albums a year and Q once or twice in a year can feel like they're catching up?

why cater an EOY list for people who only buy your magazine once or twice a year? why fill it with best-selling albums when those same people could just go into Tesco and see the same albums there in the actual chart?

On further analysis if The Killers make #1 this weekend the list will have 15 chart toppers. You can see 13 of those records in this weeks Top 75. I also don't see why have a top 50 like that, has they gone down to 100 and put something you might not see in Tesco it might have been worthwhile.

why cater an EOY list for people who only buy your magazine once or twice a year?

"Cater" might be too strong a word, but there's def. a market for people who won't follow music all year-round but will pay closer attention at the end of the year because they know they everything they want to know will be condensed into convenient summaries. It's kind of the music equivalent of people who don't watch much sports, but stay glued to the TV during the Olympics, or even people who don't watch too many movies, but will watch the Academy Awards to check out the winners and make sure they haven't missed out on anything big.

w/r/t to what Dorian said above, I just realized that I haven't voted for a single rap record this year, in all the various year-end lists I've submitted (they're different for diff publications for criteria reasons and the fact that I actually vote for "national" and "local" CDs for one outlet).

nothing was AWESOME in hip-hop this year, you know? and the likeliest candidates all got pushed back from late 2008 to early 2009.

ABN are Assholes By Nature, Houston diehards Z-Ro and Trae together. I think all those records I mentioned are better than the Lil Wayne record.

If you like avant-garde and noise, i suggest starting with the Roots record, which is pretty apocalyptic and unforgiving and moving on to Guilty Simpson, which is Madlibby stuff that The Wire readers could prolly fuck with.

That Lil Wayne record should be finishing high in critics polls, probably higher than it has on these listed. I mean it's really good and really popular, which tends to be what rises to the top when consensus is measured.

I don't think it's the best record of the year or anything, but it's one of the best albums that also sold a lot and MIGHT be the best hip-hop album in a relatively weak year for hip-hop albums.